Impact Malawi impacts lives of many African villagers and Brockville couple
Posted Nov 19, 2009 By Conan De Vries
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EMC News - When John and Joan Childs returned home from a three-month humanitarian trip to Africa earlier this summer, it occurred to them that they'd changed not only the lives of several hundred Malawian villagers but their own as well. 
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Joan Childs and young girl from one of the nine Malawian villages that Impact Malawi serves.
"My experience in Malawi was the greatest privilege of my lifetime," says Joan.
It was Joan's fifth trip to the southern African country and her husband's second, but it was the first for both of more than a couple weeks' duration.
"We got more done in those three months than we had in the last five years," says Joan.
The Brockville couple's work in Malawi is done under the auspices of a program called Impact Malawi, an undertaking of Brockville's Youth Unlimited, which is run by Pastor Kevin Smith. He, along with his wife, Sandi, have made many trips to Malawi, and, in 2004, they gave Joan the opportunity to join them.
Accompanying the Smiths once a year since, Joan has helped deliver mosquito nets, water purification systems and blankets to the villages adopted under the Impact Malawi program. And, eventually, the group managed to build a small nursery school in one of the villages.
Through Impact Malawi, the Childs and Smiths now have nine villages under their care and have focused their efforts on providing to each a safe water supply, irrigation for gardens and an as yet experimental chicken-farming enterprise.
Whatever they do, however, their projects are carefully considered and are intended to make the villagers' daily lives easier and to better their quality of life.
"These people have one step up from nothing," says John. "If you do anything for them, no matter what it is, you're helping."
One of the most transformative changes that can be made in an impoverished African village is the provision of safe drinking water. This was job number one for the Childs during their most recent excursion.
It is a testament to the waste wrought by poor planning that Impact Malawi even needs to find a way to deliver potable water to these villages. Each one already has a 100 ft. bore hole fitted with a large stainless steel water pump, all provided by the local government or Western charities. But unfortunately, according to the Childs, none of them work.
The pumps weren't very durable and proved difficult to fix when they inevitably broke down. Parts were hard to find and even if they were available, few villages had the $300 required to make the necessary repairs.
"That's a lot of money for a village, so they just don't get them fixed," says John.
"You end up with an expensive hole in the ground."
Unfortunately, without access to the clean well water, villagers resorted to their own hand-dug water holes, each about a metre across and up to 40 ft. deep, often with an old tire placed around the opening to protect it from contamination.
The tire isn't quite up to the task, though. Surface water runoff, often containing traces of human feces, flows easily into the water hole, and the scrounged rope and bucket the villagers regularly toss down the hole continually pollutes the water.
Luckily, the Childs became acquainted with a British organization called PumpAid, which works to provide drinkable water and improve sanitation in both Zimbabwe and Malawi.
This group developed a pump dubbed the "elephant pump" based on an age-old and very simple rope and washer design. This ingenious little rig is not only cheap to install and easy to repair but can pull up more than 50 litres of water a second and provide clean drinking water to an entire village.
"This isn't black box technology," says John.
It costs about $1,400 to build one of these pumps, and Impact Malawi has been splitting the cost with PumpAid. In three months this summer, the Childs helped install four of the elephant pumps in four different villages "helped" being the operative word.
"You want the villagers to do as much as they are able to do, so that it makes the project their own," says Joan.
Villagers helped dig the well, they made all the bricks used to line the hole and they helped install the pumping apparatus.
"That's really the best way to do it," says Joan.
The Childs were also lucky to happen upon an abandoned water tank and tower, remnants of someone else's failed irrigation project, in the village of Hanoke. John was able to rig the tank with a pump to provide reliable irrigation for the surrounding arable land.
Now, villagers have subdivided that land into dozens of small gardens, each of which will provide food enough for a family with some left over to sell.
"We provided the hoses and the water, but they have to tend the gardens," says John, adding that it is nearly time for the village's first harvest.
While the one village is pulling up vegetables, three others are collecting eggs.
Most rural Malawians live on a diet of maize and are often malnourished by their lack of protein. This is particularly true for children. Impact Malawi introduced a pilot program in the hope of providing an egg per day to each child in the three villages with about 20 left over to sell in order to earn enough money to pay for chicken feed.
The Childs built a chicken coop in each of the villages and bought 100 chickens to populate each. Two girls from each of the villages were sent to a nearby poultry farm for a crash course on raising chickens.
Ideally, each coop would yield about 90 eggs, which would provide sufficiently for the children's breakfast and give the village a saleable commodity. Unfortunately, the project has run into some not unexpected growing pains. At the moment, the chickens are producing too few eggs, and the village must sell them all so as to have enough money to buy feed for the chickens.
"Not being there is really frustrating," says Joan, who is optimistic that the chicken program can be refined and made to work, but doing so from thousands of miles away is tricky.
The Childs hope to return to Malawi in February to iron out the kinks in the chicken coops.
"We're not going to go ahead with another coop until we're sure this is going to work," says John.
For a while, John was a little ambivalent about returning to Malawi, torn between spending all that money on airfare and lodging for he and his wife or sending that money directly to the Malawi village to help support their aid programs.
He's not torn anymore, though.
"It's important that you have people on the ground," he says. "You really have to be there."
Impact Malawi is always on the lookout for fundraising opportunities and for generous supporters of their cause. A recent bike-a-thon raised more than $2,000, which could build two chicken coops or two elephant pumps.
The Childs are hoping their story might appeal to some donors willing to provide between $10 and $100 a month to help support their Malawi projects on an ongoing basis.
Anybody interested in helping support Impact Malawi is invited to call John or Joan Childs at 613-342-8881 or e-mail them at joan.childs@cogeco.ca.
